Pennsylvania AG Dropping Twitter Subpoena

Pennsylvania prosecutors are dropping their grand jury subpoena to Twitter demanding the identity of two account holders who used the microblogging service to criticize Attorney General Tom Corbett, a spokesman said Friday.

Corbett, the Republican candidate for governor, was seeking to unmask the account holders ahead of Friday’s sentencing of Brett Cott, whom Corbett targeted in a political corruption investigation.

Corbett wanted to know if Cott was the one anonymously disparaging Corbett and the ongoing probe, Corbett spokesman Kevin Harley said in a telephone interview. Prosecutors believed that linking Cott to one of the Twitter accounts criticizing Corbett would show the defendant had a bad attitude that should earn him a higher sentence, Harley said.

Harley said they wanted to unmask the account holders “to show the court Cott was demonstrating a lack of contrition and remorse.”

On Friday, Cott was handed up to five years in prison for his role in the political corruption scandal known as Bonusgate. Dauphin County Judge Richard Lewis said he did not consider any online criticism in his sentencing decision.

The grand jury subpoena targeted Twitter accounts CasablancaPA and bfBarbie. Both received an e-mail from Twitter on Tuesday saying the company would respond to the subpoena (.pdf) in a week “unless we receive notice from you that a motion to quash the subpoena has been filed or that this matter has been otherwise resolved.”

The two had enlisted Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union to fight the subpoena. They said it was an abuse of power by Corbett to use the power of a criminal grand jury to unmask his critics.

“It’s clear they were on a fishing expedition to see if these Twitter users were Cott,” Witold Walczak, legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. “That’s not only an abuse of the grand jury process but a real affront to political speech rights … The government just can’t go on fishing expeditions like that to unmask critics because it might be helpful on sentencing.”